Linda Gasser

During a racially motivated rampage in Hanau, Hesse, Tobias R. kills nine citizens on February 19, 2020, his mother and then himself. The words of his manifesto indicate severe psychological problems. This psychogram of a mass murderer shows how withdrawn Tobias R. radicalized himself through fake news and delusion for years before it came to a catastrophe.

In a strange place where daily broadcasts require everyone to “keep the silence”, the long-isolated residents of Edifice 129, trapped in their apartments and by distant memories, creep forwards, day by day. / Edifice 129 is a particular collaborative project, created by filmmakers across three countries. In the midst of the COVID-19 lock-downs, Linda Gasser — director of the Arc Film Festival in Mainz, Germany — invited filmmakers to join her Creatives Across Borders initiative. The aim was to meet via Zoom, support each other, and talk film, but talking film soon turned into developing a film. Meeting regularly, sometimes weekly, four writer/directors and a digital 3D artist created short films designed to work both as standalone projects and, when inter-cut, as one cohesive story, despite being filmed in Germany, the UK and Malta, and with the filmmakers never having met in person until after the films were finished.

Mutiny: Some caregivers party in a New Year’s Eve nursing home. Boarding: A Congolese family living in Germany is visited by a pretend social worker. Adrift: A man crushed by his community wanders in the medieval German countryside. Spanning three interlinked but stylistically distinct films, the triptych navigates the metaphoric and literal topographies of shipwreck as both rupture and reckoning, building a suggestive meditation on exile, identity, and the fractured condition of modern belonging.